Julia Riew is an American composer-lyricist, librettist, and songwriter.
Riew is a third generation Korean-American who grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. [1] [2] She was involved with music from a young age, starting violin lessons at age 4. She began writing music at age 7, and had written a musical of her own by age 15. [3] While in school, she was a member of the St. Louis Children's Choirs [4] and the Arch City Kids Theater Troupe, which put on cabarets to raise money for juvenile diabetes. [2] Her family later moved to New York City and then Connecticut. [5]
She attended Harvard University. Although initially in a pre-med program, she graduated in May 2022 with a concentration in Theater, Dance, and Media and Music. [1] [6] [7] While there, she was a founding member of the Asian Students Arts Project. [2]
Riew wrote her first college musical, Hitched, in 2018. [7] In April 2019, East Side, a student-produced musical Riew co-wrote about a Chinese-American family dealing with gentrification in New York City, premiered at Harvard's Farkas Hall. [8] After seeing the show, the American Repertory Theater (ART) commissioned Riew to write two family oriented shows: Thumbelina: A Little Musical, which premiered in December 2019 at the Loeb Center, and Jack and the Beanstalk: A Musical Adventure. [2] In June 2022 she premiered Alice's Wonderland at the Coterie Theater in Kansas City, Missouri, a show she co-wrote with J. Quinton Johnson. [7]
For her senior thesis, Riew began developing a musical inspired by the Korean folktale Shimcheong and her own experiences with Korean-American identity. [9] [10] In January 2022 she shared some of her music on TikTok, where as of August 2024 she had a following of 135,000 users and 3.5 million likes. [1] [6] Shimcheong: A Folktale was later renamed to Dive. Riew put on her thesis in February and March 2022 on Harvard's campus. [6] In February 2023 Riew performed several of her songs as part of Playbill's Songwriter Series. [11]
In April 2023 ART announced they would further develop Dive with the help of Riew, Diana Son, and Diane Paulus. [1] [12] Other upcoming projects include her musical ENDLESS (dir. by Zi Alikhan, premiering in Korea), her YA fantasy novel The Last Tiger (co-written with brother Brad Riew, publishing with Penguin Random House in Aug 2025), and her Middle Grade fantasy novel Shimcheong (publishing with Harper Collins summer 2026). [13]